Near Field Communication (NFC) is a radio frequency (RF) technology allowing electronic devices equipped with NFC communication modules comprising a transmitter and/or a receiver to communicate with each other over short ranges. Electronic devices adapted for NFC communication is often referred to as NFC-enabled devices.
Today, NFC technology is primarily used to connect electronic devices, access digital content, admission control to specific premises, and make contactless transactions. For example, NFC can be used to connect wireless components in a home office system or a headset with a mobile phone, to read a “smart” poster embedded with an RF tag and to pay for tickets, access or other products using an NFC-enabled mobile phone.
The NFC Forum is an organization that promotes the use of NFC technology in consumer electronics, mobile devices, and PCs by providing a framework for NFC application development and interoperability between NFC-enabled devices. The NFC Forum develops standards-based specifications that define NFC device architecture and protocols for interoperability.
The NFC Forum has specified a message format definition referred to as the Generic Control Record Type Definition (Generic Control RTD) in order to provide a way to request any specific action to an NFC-enabled device (a destination device) from another NFC-enabled device, a tag or a card (source device) through NFC communication. One purpose of the Generic Control RTD is to avoid that NFC application/service providers create their own record types which may give rise to incompatibility issues and increase the complexity of NFC-enabled devices as they would have to be adapted to handle different types of message formats.
A Generic Control record comprises a Target record, an Action record and a Data record. The content of the Target record, normally referred to as the Target Identifier, identifies a function or application to process the data contained in the Data record. The function/application identified by a Target Identifier will in this document be referred to as the target application of that Target Identifier. The content of the Action record specifies for the target application the desired action to be applied to the data in the Data record. Thus, when a Generic Control record is received by a destination device, the destination device launches the target application of the Target Identifier in the received Generic Control record.
The Generic Control RTD assumes that the destination device is able to identify the target application of the Target Identifier in a received Generic Control record and that the target application is installed on the destination device. If the destination device is unable to identify or find the requested target application, the specification says that the device should simply ignore the Generic Control record.
In reality this may pose significant problems as NFC-enabled devices may be unable to communicate with other NFC-enabled devices or to interpret tags or cards from which they receive Generic Control records. These problems may delay or even prevent adoption of NFC technology since end-users may not be able to benefit from available NFC services as they may not know which application is needed or how to obtain the application needed to use a particular NFC service. Furthermore, this restriction in the specification poses a problem to NFC service providers as it is difficult to distribute the application needed to use a new service to all potential end-users. Thus, NFC service providers may experience problems in getting new NFC services out on the market, which further delays adoption of NFC technology.